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X-WR-CALNAME:Department of Physics and Astronomy
X-ORIGINAL-URL:http://physics.unc.edu
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Department of Physics and Astronomy
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20170925T153000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20170925T170000
DTSTAMP:20171214T002613
CREATED:20170403T173351Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170814T121330Z
UID:10326-1506353400-1506358800@physics.unc.edu
SUMMARY:"The Maps Inside Your Head"-Vijay Balasubramanian
DESCRIPTION:UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium \nVijay Balasubramanian\, University of Pennsylvania \n“The Maps Inside Your Head” \nAbstract: How do our brains make sense of a complex and unpredictable world? In this talk\, I will discuss a physicist’s approach to the neural topography of information processing in the brain. First I will review the brain’s architecture\, and how neural circuits map out the sensory and cognitive worlds. Then I will describe how highly complex sensory and cognitive tasks are carried out by the cooperative action of many specialized neurons and circuits\, each of which has a simple function. I will illustrate my remarks with one sensory example and one cognitive example. For the sensory example\, I will consider the sense of smell (“olfaction”)\, whereby humans and other animals distinguish vast arrays of odor mixtures using very limited neural resources. For the cognitive example\, I will consider the “sense of place”\, that is\, how animals mentally represent their physical location. Both examples demonstrate that brains have evolved neural circuits that exploit sophisticated principles of mathematics – principles that scientists have only recently discovered. \n \n
URL:http://physics.unc.edu/event/physics-astronomy-colloquium-2017-09-25/
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